OP-ED: Canada’s drift under technocratic continuity

Brock Eldon writes, "Pearson International Airport greets no one with affection. The ceilings sag, the lights hum, the customs kiosks glare like screensavers for a country running on autopilot."

Source: Wikimedia Commons

By Brock Eldon

Pearson International Airport greets no one with affection. The ceilings sag, the lights hum, the customs kiosks glare like screensavers for a country running on autopilot. After more than a decade living in the crush and chaos of Southeast Asia, I returned with my wife and young daughter expecting a homecoming. What I found instead was a country in an advanced state of administrative rot—an air of exhaustion disguised as order.

In Vietnam, I had learned that rules often existed only on paper. Life pulsed in the spaces between regulations. In Canada, I discovered the reverse: the paper was absolute. Every ambition demanded an application, a credential, a licence, a waitlist. Where Hanoi thrived by ignoring bureaucracy, Canada risked suffocating by obeying its own. Even our much-touted ten-dollar-a-day childcare program looked perfect on paper but collapsed in practice—centres closing for lack of staff, parents stranded on endless lists.

I had dreamed of returning north for years. Through Saigon’s rains and Hanoi’s heat, I imagined the smell of snow, the hush of fields, the moral clarity of cold air. But what greeted me was not clarity—it was drift.

At Pearson, overhead screens replayed the story of continuity. Mark Carney, the anointed successor to Justin Trudeau, was being profiled as the steady hand guiding Canada toward a tenth year of Liberal rule. Continuity was the word, though it felt like permafrost. Carney’s rise, and the media’s reverence for it, confirmed what philosopher George Grant foresaw six decades ago: Canada would not be conquered from without but dissolved from within, absorbed into the global liberal empire by its own faith in managerial competence.

To Grant, liberalism was not a political program but a philosophy of surrender—the elevation of efficiency over loyalty, of cosmopolitan abstraction over inherited forms of life. Carney is the natural heir to that creed: a man of charts, summits and carbon ledgers, fluent in the dialect of Davos. He presents himself as the sober adult in the room, yet his technocratic vision reduces Canada to a spreadsheet—our worth measured in ESG metrics, our sovereignty traded for “alignment” with global partners. Continuity, under Carney, would mean dependency: a nation run by managers rather than stewards.

The signs of this dependency are everywhere. The federal government expands its control while promising compassion. Medical Assistance in Dying, once a narrow exception, has become a bureaucratic option for the poor, the ill, and soon perhaps the merely despairing. Over 52,000 Canadians have died of opioid overdoses since 2016, yet Ottawa is better at administering endings than sustaining lives. The same administrative reflex governs our digital life: Bill C-63, the “Online Harms” legislation, wrapped censorship in the language of safety, while the CBC performs “diversity” as a ritual of compliance.

We have built a culture that confuses paperwork with progress, compassion with control. The country runs on slogans and subsidies, yet the streets grow meaner and the institutions colder. Toronto’s transit system recorded more than a thousand violent incidents last year. Grocery aisles are staffed by seniors and recent arrivals; youth are vanishing into anxiety and screens. We are a polite people, but the temperature of our public life is sub-zero.

I had imagined my return as belonging, but it felt more like audit. Canada today resembles what Leonard Cohen once called “the inside of the frozen mammoth”: cold, fascinating, lifeless. Our elites congratulate themselves for “managing” crises while creativity and confidence leak away. Even our guilt has become performative. History is no longer a conversation but a creed; to question an official narrative is to risk heresy. The national pastime is not hockey but confession.

Yet the idea of the North still flickers. The poet Al Purdy urged Canadians to “say the names” of their rivers and bays—to remember the country as something more than paperwork. David Solway wrote that North is not a latitude but a condition: “a mirror that confronts us with who we are.” That mirror now shows a nation drifting between dependency and denial, too timid to name itself.

If Carney’s continuity represents the triumph of drift, then recovering the North means rediscovering clarity—a moral orientation rather than a marketing slogan. It means confronting the cold instead of insulating ourselves from it. Grant, Frye, Atwood and Cohen all understood the paradox of this country: that survival is not merely endurance but vision.

Canada does not need more management. It needs imagination—the courage to stand still in the cold and ask what the country is for. The North, literal or metaphorical, was never meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be clarifying.

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The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Brock Eldon is an Owen Sound, Ontario–born writer, editor and educator currently based in Singapore, where he teaches English literature and serves as Associate Editor at C2C Journal. His poetry collection Dominion Ashes: A Book of Decline is forthcoming from Ballerini Books Press in February 2026.